Whitman, Fiorina Win Calif. Primaries

Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay, and Carly Fiorina, who ran Hewlett-Packard, have each won their primary battles to represent the GOP in their respective races in California.

Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay, and Carly Fiorina, who ran Hewlett-Packard, have each won their primary battles to represent the GOP in their respective races in California.

Whitman will take on former governor and current state Attorney General Jerry Brown and other Democrats for the office of governor this November, while Fiorina will challenge incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer for the Senate.

Whitman saluted Fiorina in her acceptance speech, warning Brown and Boxer that two women with business experience would be their opponents. "Career politicians in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., be warned: You now face your worst nightmare," she said, as quoted by The Los Angeles Times. "Two businesswomen from the real world who know how to create jobs, balance budgets and get things done."

Whitman spent an estimated $71 million of her own fortune on the campaign, prompting some wags to make comparisons to the "Buy It Now" option that eBay offers to supersede a public auction.

But Whitman turned that to her advantage, claiming that financial independence freed her campaign from special interests. "Here's the really good news: I don't owe anyone anything," Whitman said, according to the Times. "My opponent cannot say that, can he? He has aligned nearly every single interest group in Sacramento against us.

At press time, the race pitting Chris Kelly, a former executive at Facebook, against Kamala Harris, hadn't been decided.

UPDATE: After spending $12 million on his campaign, Kelly lost to Harris, The Wall Street Journal reports.]

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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